Daily Archives: May 13, 2025

10 May 2025: A Historic Celebration in London

After 75 years of presence, the Romanian Orthodox Church in Great Britain and Northern Ireland has been formed into an Archdiocese with its own Archbishop Athanasius/Atanasie (Rusnak). Aged 43, he is a Russian-speaking Moldovan, as we had hoped we would have, by background an engineer. He is highly educated, who studied in France and the USA and speaks five languages fluently (not through Google translate!). Archbishop Atanasie was previously bishop in Italy and has now been transferred here, to our great delight.

Vladica lives at the monastery in Stanbridge near Luton, where we have been many times and spoken to Vladica, in front of the photographs of his, and our, beloved spiritual fathers, Metr Kallistos (Ware) (Eternal Memory!) and dear Fr Raphael (Noica). Vladica calls Fr Raphael his ‘spiritual grandfather’, which is most interesting, as he was my spiritual father. This is logical, because Vladica is exactly a generation younger than myself, but we have the same spiritual and theological heritage.

The Archdiocese is part of the expanding Autonomous Orthodox Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe, with its bishops in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Iceland and now Great Britain. In the last twenty years of intense immigration and missionary conversion of native people, it is now four million strong, and has many monasteries and convents. The Metropolia is led by the dynamic Metropolitan Joseph (Pop), who is respected internationally for his love of the monastic life, his knowledge, experience and pastoral wisdom. Its Synod of Bishops and network of parishes and monasteries is now the centre of hope for a future multinational Local Church of Western Europe.

On Saturday 10 May we celebrated the Divine Liturgy and Vladica’s Enthronement at our new St George’s Cathedral in Enfield in North London. Present were 14 bishops, Romanian, Moldovan and French, some 120 priests from the for now 90 Romanian parishes in this country and abroad. The Cathedral was packed, even though the Enthronement had to be by invitation only, as so many thousands wanted to come. The service was mainly in Romanian, but parts of it were celebrated and sung in English, as all realise that the use of English is essential in order to keep the children in the Church.

Present was Romanian Orthodox Trinitas TV, the Lord Chamberlain, representing King Charles, who so loves Romania and Romanian culture, as well as the Romanian ambassador, Dame Laura, whom we know very well. Old friends from the Serbian, Georgian, Antiochian and Greek Churches and from the canonical Russian Church under Bishop Matthew of Sourozh were present.  They all concelebrated, except for the latter because of the political dispute between the Russian Church with the Greek Church, one of whose bishops concelebrated, but he did take communion with us.

Fortunately, despite its dispute with the Greek Church, the canonical Russian Church is in full communion with the Romanian Church. The Sourozh group recognises the sacraments of other Orthodox, unlike the schismatic Russians, who tried to steal and close our church (when it remained open in faithfulness), actively slandered us and made death threats. Why other Russian Orthodox bishops tolerate such behaviour remains a mystery, though the schismatic and violent ‘Russian’ has had to be restrained by the canonical Russians.

The Romanian and Moldovan Diaspora in this country now numbers over one million and the Church is growing rapidly, with many ordinations of properly qualified and educated, seminary-trained young men to the clergy. More are now training at the largely Romanian-run Theological Institute in Cambridge, including three more candidates from our ever-expanding Colchester parish, as well as in the Romanian Institutes in Paris and Rome. Within a few years, there is no reason to think that the total number of parishes, each of which is already attended by hundreds every Sunday, will not grow to several hundred.

Just in the last few weeks, large churches have been bought in Southampton in southern England and in Dundee, in Scotland and consecrations are going ahead. The Church is young and energetic, as witnessed to by the vibrant Cathedral choir, there are many children, and the average age of clergy and people is about 35. Many, especially women, dressed in national costume for the celebration. Although in Colchester we do about 150 baptisms a year, another parish does 1,000 a year. After the celebration all the priests were awarded a pectoral cross and certificate/gramota in honour of the event.

Afterwards, 300 of us, including ‘the Colchester Diocese’, as we are known(!), attended the reception at a Romanian-owned hotel complex with large grounds, situated in Elstree. We had a very nice dinner at 4,00 pm and were able to talk to several bishops, including the new young Moldovan Bishop Benjamin, and learned many interesting and positive things, especially from Metropolitan Joseph, who is so kind to us.

Vladica related to us events at the consecration of the new Serbian bishop in Paris last year. (I studied at seminary in Paris with the former Bishop, the now departed Bishop Luka in the 1970s. Eternal Memory!). We were very touched by the words of Archbishop Atanasie who said to us: ‘Thank you for everything you do for us’. These words rang in our ears. It is clear that we will be able to continue to help the Romanian Church with liturgical texts in English, as we have already done over the last ten years, as well as with the many Ukrainians and Russians who come to us, refugees in search of a non-political Church.

Having set out at 5.00 on Saturday morning, we returned home at 10.00 in the evening, very tired, but very happy on this historic day. We now look forward to Vladica’s visit to us on All Saints Day, 15 June. The Church moves forward by leaps and bounds, in the mainstream of the Orthodox Life, as we look forward to the future, away from the petty nationalistic and ideological political disputes of others in the past.

 

Striving for Russian Church Unity: A Historical Note

For 47 years, from 1975 to 2022, I strived to help create unity inside the severely divided Russian Church, which then consisted of three aggressively warring ‘jurisdictions’. From 1975 to 2000 I fought against the Saducees with their ‘anything goes’, swim with the tide secularists, ‘all religions are the same’, ‘we all have the same god’ syncretism. From 2000 to 2022, I fought against the Pharisees, the scribes and the hypocrites, the old words for narcissists, who love only themselves are therefore Anti-Christians.

The division was purely political and went back to 1917. Only once we had achieved unity inside the Russian Church through the non-political, those of goodwill, in each group, could we hope to achieve unity with representatives of the other Local Churches in the Diaspora and so work towards a Local Western European Orthodox Church. To our great joy, we saw intra-Russian Church fully achieved in 2019.

However, the devil also has ears. Three years later, just like Constantinople with its control freak and isolating mentality decades earlier, the Russian Church then suicidally destroyed that unity through more nationalist politics. As a result, in 2022, all of us multinational clergy, parishes and people, some 5,000 in all, crossed, with the approval of Moscow (rather like Fr/St Sophrony (Sakharov) in 1965) to what will be the largest part of the future Local Church, the Romanian. The Russian Church in the Diaspora is now isolated and very small, as it has lost Ukrainians and now many Moldovans, not to mention local people.

In the last three years, the Moscow Church in Moldova has lost nearly half its parishes. According to updated information, Moscow now has 1,200 parishes and the Romanian Bessarabian Metropolia no longer has 200, but 1,100 parishes, with many monasteries. The movement from Moscow to Bucharest is in one direction only, at the rate of 4, 6 and even 10 parishes and mainly young people per week. As Metr Vladimir famously wrote in October 2023, Moscow treats Moldovans like second-class citizens, just as it treats other Non-Russians, including English people. See:

https://gordonua.com/news/worldnews/rossija-otnositsja-k-nam-kak-k-beskhrebetnomu-narodu-mitropolit-moldavskoj-pravoslavnoj-tserkvi-napisal-pismo-hlave-rpts-1685283.html

Although Metr Vladimir wonders about contacting Constantinople and asking it for autocephaly, that will not happen. Patriarch Bartholomew does not want to interfere in Moldova (he already made his huge mistake in the Ukraine) and get on the wrong side of Bucharest. He will be going here next October to take part in the consecration of the new Patriarchal Cathedral, the largest Orthodox church in the world. It is too late for Constantinople, just as it is too late for Moscow. Far more likely, given Moscow’s stubborn refusal 30 years ago to grant Moldova autonomy or autocephaly, is that the elderly Moscow jurisdiction in Moldova will disappear, except for the ultra-Russian nationalist Bishop Markel, and Bucharest will grant Moldova autonomy.

This will also mean the end of most of the Russian Diaspora in Western Europe, as it largely consists of Ukrainians and Moldovans, especially in Italy, Spain and Portugal. The nationalist attitude of Moscow is suicidal. God gave Moscow so much, the largest country in the world, and yet it destroyed it twice, in 1917 and then again very recently. The  Soviet-style ideology of nationalism has destroyed a once multinational Church.